One of my favorite characters in literature is Fyodor Dolokhov in Lev Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” — a seemingly terrible, cold, and profoundly calculating man who is nevertheless capable of deep emotion, of being, as the narrator puts it, “the most gentle son and brother” to his elderly mom and disabled sister.
When I began reading Tolstoy as a teenager — a love affair that became a big factor in me choosing to name my son Lev — I was surprised by Tolstoy including this seemingly stray detail about the dastardly Dolokhov’s strong ties to his family, and asked my mother about it. “Tolstoy was trying to teach us a lesson,” she said, cool and impassive, as she always seemed to me when I was growing up. “People are often more than they seem.”
I think about Dolokhov often as I observe what’s taking place in my adopted motherland, the United States. In 2020, we are plagued by an off-the-rails presidential election and an actual plague. We also act like it can’t possibly get worse, though the whole of human history teaches us precisely otherwise.
It’s an insane time in a country that already has very poor access to mental-health care a lot of the time. We’re struggling, so we look for touchstones, for simple stories of light and dark. Whether we rail against cancel culture or embrace it, we long for a kind of dumbing down of the general ethos. Let bad guys be bad guys, let good guys be good, otherwise we don’t wish to engage with the plot. We’re too tired to do so — and too scared of the potential social-media fallout.
I’m not sure what Tolstoy would have made of our society, but I can definitely imagine him tapping us all on the shoulder and reminding us of guys like Dolokhov. Men broken by the world, but still occupying an important place in it. Men who can teach us something — not so much about their own stories, but about ourselves and our society.
Speaking of this society: like many people, I was hit hard by the passing of Chadwick Boseman, and shocked by the fact that he was quietly battling cancer for years, while bringing amazing characters to life on the screen. Again, my mother’s words came back to me: “People are often more than they seem” — not that Boseman needed to appear any larger in life. But what also struck me was the importance of the hero narrative, its place in our national psyche, and how its fragility can give it even greater power.
You can’t compare Black Panther to Dolokhov… except when you look at him in terms of his function of teaching a society something about itself. When Black Panther first arrives to save the day in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” I couldn’t help but cry a little, and those tears have taken on a new dimension since Boseman’s death. We come to know mighty heroes — and there’s no doubt that in his cancer fight and his stunning, unbelievable commitment to both his work and to greater justice in our country, Boseman was as much a hero as the character he played — through their vulnerabilities. We come to know shady villains through their compassion. Some of us are worse than others, and some are better, but there is no doubt that everyone plays their role, and this goes for both the Black Panthers and the Dolokhovs of the world — and for all of the private battles that never see the light of day.
People are complex, we play multiple roles across other people’s lives, and we can never be truly summed up until we die — and the ways in which we are summed up may differ. This complexity is a great comfort to me this year, even as we careen from disaster to disaster, with no one having much of an idea as to where we might all end up (besides, once again, being dead eventually).
So if you are struggling to calm yourself, if you feel hatred for your friends and neighbors, if you feel hopelessness and despair, remember this: every one of us is capable of containing a mystery. There are things you don’t know about others. There are powers at work, and your mind is one of them. When we let people surprise us, we are humbled, and it’s in our humility that we can forge better bonds.
It’s with humility, also, that we can pull ourselves back from the brink.
Image credit: Eric Golub